Record a long session

During a customer lesson for our ERP we want to record the whole lesson. The problem is, that the lesson will be about 4 hours so that one point is the performance of the trainer laptop / PC (incl. VMs) and the second point is the file size (Camtasia-File / Record file). Is there any workaround to record a long session? Or should we use another solution?

We did try for 1.5 hours once, but if you do not have a monster machine recording and editing, I would not recommend trying that. Instead I ́d suggest breaking this up into four max one hour recordings. - the editing will move faster afterwards, and Your customer surely also will appreciate a couple of minutes off each hour... ;-)

Are you doing the training via a web session... most of the web meeting apps record both audio and video in a very compact file... I use join.me all the time for this and it creates a very compact MP4 file... we record everything... and sometimes I'll use Camtasia to clean up areas that need it.

Like Dustin, we use Join.Me extensively for customer interactions, often lasting 90 minutes or more. The recordings are not extremely high quality, but they're definitely usable and the file size is surprisingly small. I just downloaded a 98-minute recording I did last week and it's only 221MB.

We do periodic in-person training sessions but have moved heavily to online sessions because of the cost and logistics hassles of training in-person. Online training also allows us to reach more people and do ad-hoc sessions to cover specific topics with customers who contact us for help.

We're using Camtasia to create self-service videos covering common topics and questions. To some degree, we're duplicating what we teach online, but we're breaking it down into short videos that are more focused. That allows our customers to pinpoint what they need and get answers to their questions quickly. It also allows them to consume it at their own pace.

That's one disadvantage of recorded webinars. The sound is recorded from a telephone bridge line, so in addition to the compression and such, the quality of the phones greatly influences the audio quality. It will never be as good as well-recorded live audio.

If you are recording a webinar, and especially if you want to play recordings back over future webinars, Zoom has multiple benefits. You can get a full-featured trial account for free, it just limits calls to 40 minutes, so try it for yourself.

You asked about voice connection quality. Issues with voice quality typically occur in the bridge, or switching circuits, before the voice call ever connects to the webinar. It looks like zoom has built their own network of call-in numbers around the world from scratch, digitizing them early in the process, to keep the quality high.

You will never get uncompressed, ungated audio from a webinar recording. Zoom will, however, give you the best recording quality of any webinar vendor we've tested. They make most things easier too, like playing back full-screen video and playing system sound over the webinar. Check the screenshot below.

Interesting. It's significantly more expensive for three users (which is what we have) than Join.Me, but when our current license is approaching renewal, I'll give Zoom a test run. Thanks for the info.

One other question. Does it require any software installation on the client side? One of the main reasons that we chose Join.Me is that it doesn't require any client-side software unless you're on a tablet or a phone.

Actually no, Join.Me is completely browser-based and doesn't download anything to the client machine for one-way meetings (they can see our monitor, but not vice-versa). That's all we do for security/liability reasons.

I think we may be getting too far off-topic and I don't want to annoy anyone, so perhaps we should end this conversation or move it offline.